Defense of the Ancients (DotA) is a custom scenario for Warcraft III, based on the "Aeon of Strife" map for StarCraft. The objective of the scenario is to destroy the opponents' "Ancient". The two teams' ancients are heavily guarded structures at opposing corners of the map. Players use powerful units known as heroes, and are assisted by allied heroes and AI-controlled fighters called "creeps". As in role-playing games, players level up their hero and use gold to buy equipment during the mission.

Demigod is pretty good. Single player is like Unreal Tournament where you are working to be the best out of the 8 demigods in a round of 8 random maps with random objectives, and random teams. Skirmish is what you'd expect it to be. It also has many achievements for each of the 8 demigods that add a lot of replay value.

My only complaint is it keeps crashing on me (4 or 5 times in 6 hours).

I think it is a lot like Ground Control/World in Conflict except take your dropship and all your units and bundle it into a single upgradable unit. Just like GC/WiC, there's AI/Human players with the same objective as you.

There is an update available on impulse for Demigod that corrects some problems ...

Impulse Version: 1.0.48
Demigod EXE version: 1.00.0093

After a long night of connection server moving around along with a new ingame connection client, we are happy to release the day 2 update.

Change log:

+ Connection dialog now allows the host to eject players trying to connect.

+ New NAT Connection Server now isolated so not affected by general server load resulting in much faster, better connectivity.

+ Eliminated check for update on launching the game

+ CVP calls asynchronous (a server hicup on our side is a lot less likely to cause users to be disconnected)

Notes:

This isn’t a silver bullet. This is basically what Demigod would have been like on day 0 (minus the eject button) if the connection server wasn’t getting pounded.

That said, we’ve noticed some issues that you should be aware of that we plan to iron out this week including:

1. Because connections happen much faster in custom games, you can occasionally end up with players in the lobby that aren’t truly connected to everyone. Their ping will be yellow (or 0). The host will need to eject one of those players and have them rejoin.

3. Obviously this is an update that we would normally want to run through a 2 or 3 limited beta since major surgery was done to the servers to reduce their load. But we felt strongly that we needed to get a release out that showed improvement for most people. We expect to release another update in the next few days once we can see the effect of the connection server in conditions we consider normal.

Real-time strategy title Demigod has been crippled by over 100,000 pirates flooding the online game and overwhelming the support network, according to Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, who complained of "near MMO user connections".

According to Wardell, 120,000 connections have taken place for Demigod, with only 18,000 coming from legitimate users who actually purchased the game. This "sheer number of people" has caused "horrific results" that the company was unprepared for.

"Sadly, most of the 120,000 connections are not customers but via warez," he wrote in his blog. "About 18,000 are legitimate… We spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users."

Users found themselves unable to logon to the online service or the Demigod forums, and even running the game became a challenge as online checks for updated versions would result in a blank screen - Wardell described this as the "stuff of nightmares".

Wardell concluded: "As annoying as this issue is, it's not something that's going to be an ongoing issue, it's something that is likely to be taken care of in the next day or two. So this time next week, players will be happily playing."

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I think I will get the game just to support Stardock. I like their DRM policies.

After doing some reading it seems that the problem Stardock was seeing is that since the software (retail version) has no DRM on it (yay Stadock ) that there is no way to tell a valid, un-registered copy from a pirated one.

Since the unregistered (or pirated) versions could still connect to the server (even though they could not do anything) the effect was similar to a DDOS attack, swamping the servers.

To overcome this, they released their "day 2 update", which bumps the version number of the game (you can only get the update if your copy of the game is registered on Impulse, and Impulse is the only place to get the update), and redirects the valid users to a different NAT server so the legit players do not have problems anymore.

What they should do is have a key that comes with the software. That key is linked to your Impluse account and you have to log in to impluse to play on their online serves. That isn't DRM, just registration.

Updates get on P2P really fast too so it may stop them for a while but not for long.

What they should do is have a key that comes with the software. That key is linked to your Impluse account and you have to log in to impluse to play on their online serves. That isn't DRM, just registration.

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They do, and it works fine. The problem was that 120,000 people with unregistered software were trying to get in the servers. While they were not able to get in, the servers still had to process the incoming requests and got overloaded. They even admit that they were not prepared for that kind of traffic, as they configured their servers for about 50k people and figured they would just add on as the need grew. Whoops

Updates get on P2P really fast too so it may stop them for a while but not for long.